Cultural Representation in Native America

Posted in Anthologies, Anthropology, Books, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation on 2011-06-28 05:19Z by Steven

Cultural Representation in Native America

AltaMira Press
August 2006
192 pages
Cloth 0-7591-0984-2 / 978-0-7591-0984-1
Paper 0-7591-0985-0 / 978-0-7591-0985-8

Edited by:

Andrew J. Jolivétte, Associate Professor of American Indian Studies
San Francisco State University

Today as in the past there are many cultural and commercial representations of American Indians that, thoughtlessly or otherwise, negatively shape the images of indigenous people. Jolivétte and his co-authors challenge and contest these images, demonstrating how Native representation and identity are at the heart of Native politics and Native activism. In portrayals of a Native Barbie Doll or a racist mascot, disrespect of Native women, misconceptions of mixed race identities, or the commodification of all things “Indian”, the authors reveal how the very existence of Native people continues to be challenged, with harmful repercussions in social and legal policy, not just in popular culture. The authors re-articulate Native history, religion, identity, and oral and literary traditions in ways that allow the true identity and persona of the Native person to be recognized and respected. It is a project that is fundamental to ethnic revitalization and the recognition of indigenous rights in North America. This book is a provocative and essential introduction for students and Native and non-Native people who wish to understand the images and realities of American Indian lifeways in American society.

Table of Contents

  • PART I: Contestation and Representation, Chapter 1: Mapping Contests in Unknown Locations
    Paula Gunn Allen
  • Say Hau to Native American Barbie
    Kim Shuck
  • Liquor Moccasins
    Philip Klasky
  • (Dis)Locating Spiritual Knowledge: Embodied Ideologies, Social Landscapes, and the Power of the Neoshamanic Other
    Sara Sutler-Cohen
  • Mascots in the New Millennium
    Winona LaDuke
  • PART II: Contestation and Politics, Chapter 6: Native American Resistance and Revitalization in the Era of Self-Determination
    Troy Johnson
  • Identity, Oral Tradition, and Inter-generational Healing in the Southern Paiute Salt Songs
    Melissa Nelson
  • In the Spirit of Crazy Horse
    Winona LaDuke
  • Part III: Contestation and Mixed Race Identity; Chapter 9: In the Tracks of ‘the’ Native Woman
    Norma Alarcon
  • Chapped with Weather and Age: Mixed-Blood Identity and the Shape of History
    Sara Stuler-Cohen
  • Dunn Playing Indian
    Carolyn Dunn
  • Examining the Regional and Multi-Generational Context of Creole and American Indian Identity
    Andrew Jolivette
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Webinar: Mixed Identity and the Arts

Posted in Arts, Identity Development/Psychology, Live Events, Media Archive, United Kingdom on 2011-06-28 04:18Z by Steven

Webinar: Mixed Identity and the Arts

Runnymede Trust
2011-07-05, 10:30-12:30Z

Runnymede Trust is hosting an online seminar (webinar) discussing mixed identity and the arts. The webinar will take the form of a live-streamed discussion between the photographer and visual artist Mark Sealy, the arts consultant and creative producer Samina Zahir and playwright Roy Williams. Their discussion will last about an hour, with the second half devoted to answering questions from participants who have pre-registered for the event.

Panellists will discuss the idea of mixed and migrant identity in art. Whether it is possible to have art that addresses a mixed race or a migrant audience as it can a Black audience? If not why not? Is it possible to have art that does not come from a mixed background? Are any minority groups well represented in the Art world? Is it important that they should be? In what sense have discussions about art and race moved forward in the past two decades? What can be done to encourage this process?

The arts and mixedness project is a collaboration between the Arts Council and the Runnymede Trust. The RunnymedeTrust is the UK’s leading race equality think tank. The project was designed to examine the extent to which mixed race people are catered for by and in the arts in the UK. It was also intended to examine the ways that arts can address the issue of mixed race identity. This next stage of the project has begun to focus more directly upon audiences for works of art. It has broadened the focus of the project to examine how migrants relate to mixed identity and how art can address issues of migration.

The webinar will start at 11:30 am [BST] and will last approximately 2 hours. If you would like to participate in this event or for further information please email Kamaljeet Gill at kam@runnymedetrust.org.

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A Mixed Race Take On What It Means To Be ‘Free’

Posted in Articles, Audio, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, United States, Women on 2011-06-27 04:34Z by Steven

A Mixed Race Take On What It Means To Be ‘Free’

Tell Me More
National Public Radio
2011-06-24

NPR Staff

A lonely young New Yorker finds a puppy while jogging. A middle class couple tries navigating the treacherous waters of admission to a sought-after preschool. A new mother grows jealous of the chic and thin mom living across the hall.

It’s all stuff you may have seen before—but not quite. At least not if Danzy Senna has anything to say about it.

These are all characters in Senna’s new collection of short fiction, titled You Are Free. The stories start with the familiar, but soon take subtle turns to reveal racial and other tensions lurking not too far below the surface.

Senna herself is mixed race. Her father is half African-American and half Mexican, while her mother is Irish and English. Growing up in Boston, Senna was raised to self-identify as black.

“I think growing up black or growing up biracial is something that’s part of your daily language and your daily awareness of the world you’re living in,” she tells NPR’s Michel Martin.

But she doesn’t see her work being about race or mixed race. Instead, Senna uses race as the background of her fiction, as a way to understand the culture and characters…

Read the entire story here.
Read the transcript of the interview here.
Listen to the interview here (00:13:32).

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Mixed Race: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Autobiography, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, United States, Women on 2011-06-23 21:19Z by Steven

Mixed Race: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

Rafu Shimpo: Los Angeles Japanese Daily News
2011-06-19

Velina Hasu Houston

Recently I was honored with a Loving Award from the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival (held June 11-12 at the Japanese American National Museum). The award and the meaning behind it has caused me to reflect on multiracial identity.

My parents married in 1954 after a nine-year courtship in Japan. When they left Japan, they arrived in the U.S., a country in which their marriage was illegal in 17 states and would remain so until 1967, two years before my father’s death.

In the landmark civil rights case Loving v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court finally struck down laws against interracial marriage, honoring the marriage of Afro-Indian Mildred Loving and her white husband Richard (who also were second cousins).

I grew up in a community where being mixed race was a natural thing, at least for those of us who had foreign mothers and American fathers. We were multiracial, multiethnic, and multicultural — and often, like me, transnational. The idea of having a foot in at least two countries and being a blend of three or four ethnicities was par for the course…

Read the entire article here.

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Who Are We? Producing Group Identity through Everyday Practices of Conflict and Discourse

Posted in Articles, Campus Life, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2011-06-22 04:10Z by Steven

Who Are We? Producing Group Identity through Everyday Practices of Conflict and Discourse

Sociological Perspectives
Volume 54, Number 2 (Summer 2011)
pages. 139-162
DOI: 10.1525/sop.2011.54.2.139

Jennifer A. Jones, SBS Diversity Post Doctoral Fellow
Ohio State University, Columbus

Multiracials have the flexibility to opt out of multiracial identity, to shift identities depending on context and are characterized by in-group diversity. Given this fluid space, how do multiracials come to see themselves as a collective? This article describes an empirical example of collectivization processes at work. Specifically, the author observed the process of collective identity-building though ethnographic research in a mixed-race student-run organization. This case study indicates that group identity formation is a negotiated process involving strategies to achieve a sense of belonging and cohesion. The author shows that overtime, by using experiences of social conflict to construct shared experiences, the members of this mixed-race organization developed collective identity In so doing, their experience underscores how collective identity development is socially constructed and how micropractices are essential components of group formation.

Read or purchase the article here.

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Turning Dreams to Chaos: Multiplicity and the Construction of Identity

Posted in Dissertations, Identity Development/Psychology, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Passing, Women on 2011-06-20 03:46Z by Steven

Turning Dreams to Chaos: Multiplicity and the Construction of Identity

Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, California
2003
249 pages
ISBN (eBook): 978-3-638-68960-1
Archive No.: V7499
DOI: 10.3239/9783638689601

Tamara Hollins

A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Claremont Graduate University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate Field of English

This work will reflect on the mutability of meaning in the female mulatto body as well as on the mutability of perception by acknowledging the erroneous nature of race and its concrete results, by examining the valorization and undermining of racial essentialism and heterogeneity, and by revealing passing as bound by the social and legal restraints related to the physical body even as it interrogates racial classifications. Specifically, this study will explore how some nineteenth century, modern, and postmodern American narratives containing mulattoes and passing personas produce a resolution reiterating the structure of race or new subjectivities within or possibly without the color line. Through this exploration, the war between the homogenous Self and the different Other will play out. In an effort to unite a divided personality, the Other will counter attempts by the Self to maintain essentialism. The success lies not in the final outcome but in recognizing the subversive acts of the Other and the irrational tactics of the Self as continuously revealing the subjects as always already married and as surpassing mere essentialism into the multitudinous, heterogeneous One. Still, this work realizes that essentialism has a place in heterogeneity, even if essentialism is a logical error. Duality and conflict are inherent in heterogeneity, or the multitudinous One. The key is not to eradicate, in an essentialist manner, one and not the other, but to live in a state of awareness, respecting and accepting those who knowingly choose to construct identities within or without the color line.

Table of Contents

  • Introduction: Reading Meaning in the Mixed Body
  • Chapter One: Assimilating into What?: Stereotypes, Appearances, and Behavior
  • Chapter Two: Eliminating the Tragic: Intersections of Christianity, Racial Uplift, and True Womanhood
  • Chapter Three: Passing as Subversion and Reification
  • Chapter Four: The Journey Home: Replacing Tragedy with Authority
  • Chapter Five: Looking Within and Beyond Race with Irene, Clare, and Angela
  • Chapter Six: From the Passing Mulatto to the Biracial Character: Race, Class, Gender, and Family
  • Conclusion: The Community of Multiplicity

Purchase the dissertation here.

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Psychoanalysis and Interraciality: Asking Different Questions

Posted in Articles, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive on 2011-06-18 22:33Z by Steven

Psychoanalysis and Interraciality: Asking Different Questions

Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society
Volume 12, Issue 3 (2007)
pages 205–225
DOI: 10.1057/palgrave.pcs.2100121

Annie Stopford, Ph.D., Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist and Adjunct Research Fellow
University of Western Sydney, Sydney, Australia

In this article, the author questions psychoanalytic responses to interracial relationships and subjectivity. She argues that much psychoanalytic discussion on interraciality has been shaped by denial and repression of race, fears of miscegenation, and normative assumptions about the superiority of endogamy. From the perspective of hybridity studies and analytic frameworks predicated on the primacy of relationality, it is time to ask different psychoanalytic questions.

Introduction

In recent years there has been a marked increase in discussion about race, racism, and racialized subjectivity in psychoanalytic literature. One area of “race relations” which requires more attention, however, and a different kind of attention from that which it usually receives, is the area of interracial intimacy. In this article, I raise some questions about psychoanalytic responses to interracial sexual intimacy and interracial subjectivity. I argue that historical psychoanalytic responses to interracial desire, intimacy, and subjectivity were shaped by denial and repression of race, and by (unconscious) fears of miscegenation. In addition, I argue that psychoanalytic writers, past or present, who overtly or implicitly pathologize interracial desire deny full subjectivity to those in interracial relationships and of interracial parentage, inadvertently perpetuate forms of racial segregation, and mandate endogamy as the proper choice of “healthy” individuals. When informed by the insights of hybridity/critical mixed race studies and contemporary psychoanalytic frameworks embedded in notions of relationality and intersubjectivity, however, psychoanalytic perspectives can provide important insight into the intersubjective complexities, subtleties, and specificities of interracial desire and intimacy.

The article begins with some background information and discussion on general historical attitudes toward miscegenation, and the relatively recent emergence of hybridity/mixed race studies. I then show how “anti-miscegenism” permeates psychoanalysis, first by looking at the historical picture and the implications of covert racist and colonialist formulations for interracial couples and individuals, and then by examining some contemporary psychoanalytic writing on white desire for black bodies. In order to illustrate and elaborate some key issues, I utilize extracts from my research interviews with women and men who are or have been in intimate interracial relationships.

The interviews I draw on for this article are part of a wider psycho-social research project on transculturation in intimate African and non-African relationships, involving a series of conversations with 20 African and non-African women and men over a period of 2 years. There were several dominant themes in the narratives of my interlocutors, one of which was the responses of family, friends, and observers to their “mixed race” marriages, relationships, and children. I decided in the early stages of the research that I would try to let the data direct theoretical exploration, and this article is one outcome of this process (see also Stopford, 2004, 2006a, 2006b)…

Read the entire article here.

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Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada [Review]

Posted in Articles, Book/Video Reviews, Canada, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive on 2011-06-18 22:14Z by Steven

Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada [Review]

Quill and Quire – Canada’s Magazine of Book News and Reviews
October 2001

Hugh Hodges, Associate Professor of English
Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario

Lawrence Hill, Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada, Harper Collins Canada, September 2001, 256 pages, Paperback ISBN: 9780006385080; ISBN10: 0006385087.

With Black Berry, Sweet Juice Lawrence Hill opens an overdue discussion of what racial identity means to Canadians of mixed race. It’s a worthwhile project, but Hill undermines his intentions by trying to address academics and casual readers at the same time. The book falls somewhere between memoir and sociological study, but achieves neither the warmth of the former nor the rigour of the latter.

Hill’s reflections on race are often inconsistent. He pays lip service to the idea that cultures and communities are open-ended, but tends to speak of them as if they were homogenous and closed. He also seems to change his mind several times about whether racial identity is chosen by an individual or something they are born with. He argues that in contemporary Canada people are free to self-identify, but suggests that the person of mixed heritage who chooses not to identify himself as black will find that “his own race [will] take a bite out of his backside.”

Read the entire review here.

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Generation Mix? A Statement of Purpose

Posted in Articles, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science, United States on 2011-06-16 03:35Z by Steven

Generation Mix? A Statement of Purpose

Mixed Dreams: towards a radical multiracial/ethnic movement
2011-06-13

Nicole Asong Nfonoyim

Call it a quarter-life crisis. A change in the winds, perhaps. Maybe it’s my sad stack of rejection letters from graduate schools. Whatever the case may be, of late, I’ve been having a bit of an intellectual, (even vaguely political) existential crisis when it comes to “mixed-race” issues. So, almost two years since I embarked on my self-proclaimed crusade toward a radical engagement with mixed issues, it’s about that time to remind myself of the basics that started it all…

Mixed-Consciouness: In Search of a Political Education

Political education is crucial and yet, many of us are painfully deficient. For me political education is about developing a critical consciousness- a fancy word for a way of thinking and being and perhaps, most importantly understanding who we are and how we fit (and don’t fit) into wider systems and structures of power, privelege and opression we are all a part of. Since mixed folk have historically never been recognized as legitimate social or political subjects in this country, figuring out who we are let alone how we fit into these systems can be a struggle to say the least.

So how do we politically educate and raise consciousness—individually and collectively? Well, for me it starts with taking a look back into our pasts. Now, the type of reading and understanding of history I’m taking about is not this often random, ahistorical revisionist type that attempts to reclaim “mixed-race” people of the past and present: DuBois was mixed and so is Slash!!!Wooot!!! (though very cool, nonetheless). Our history is there, between the lines of colonial history, Native histories, slavery, U.S. expansion, immigration, Asian-American history, Latina/o & Chicana/o histories,  U.S. military imperialism etc etc.—we’re all there, we are and our ancestors are all part of these histories—even me, with parents who didn’t come to this country until the early 70s. My history is nevertheless tied to immigrant histories and policies that made it possible for my parents to come here, my connection to black, Latin@ and East Indian histories are rooted in my parent’s identities as part of the wider African and Indian diasporas and systems of global colonialism and imperialism that spread millions around the world over centuries and subjected them to the phenomenon of racialization…

Read the entire article here.

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The Role of Reflected Appraisals in Racial Identity: The Case of Multiracial Asians

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2011-06-14 18:00Z by Steven

The Role of Reflected Appraisals in Racial Identity: The Case of Multiracial Asians

Social Psychology Quarterly
Volume 67, Number 2 (June 2004)
pages 115-131
DOI: 10.1177/019027250406700201

Nikki Khanna, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Vermont

Asian Americans are one of the fastest-growing minorities in the United States and show the highest outmarriage rate; yet little research has investigated the racial identity of multiracial Asians. This study explores the racial identity of multiracial Asians in the United States, using survey data on 110 Asian-white adults, and examines the factors that shape this identity. The literature suggests a number of factors; drawing on the theoretical framework of reflected appraisals, I hypothesize that certain factors will be more important than others in this process. When respondents were asked with which race they identified more strongly, Asian or white, two factors were shown to exert the strongest influence on racial identity, namely phenotype and cultural exposure. Logistic regression and qualitative responses reveal that the racial identities of this sample of Asian-white adults are shaped largely by the reflected appraisals of others regarding their appearance and cultural knowledge.

Read or purchase the article here.

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